Businesses, universities, and other entities typically deploy networks within their organization, to assist in the transfer of data and for communications purposes such as e-mail. The efficacy of such internal networks, which may include local area networks (LANs) that are primarily located in one geographic location, as well as wide area networks (WANs) that may be spread across a number of geographic locations, are obviously improved by being connected to still other networks, such as the Internet, as well as each other. One configuration for connecting, for example, a WAN for a company's New York City office to a WAN for the same company's Los Angeles office, is to connect the two WANs to a so-called provider network. The routers that connect the WANs with the provider network are commonly referred to as edge routers. Those on the company-owned WAN side of the network are called customer edge routers, while those on the provider-owned side of the network are known as provider edge routers. Communications from the New York City office WAN thus travel from a node on that WAN to a customer edge router, than to a provider edge router on one side of the provider network, over the provider network to a provider edge router on the other side of the provider network, and then to a customer edge router in the Los Angeles office WAN, and finally to the destination node on the Los Angeles office WAN. Depending on the size of the networks, vast amounts of data may thus be communicated between WANs.
Numerous types of wide area network (WAN) accelerators have been defined to help customer edge routers (CEs) achieve maximum throughput out of their WAN links. WAN accelerators require the use of proprietary mechanisms or manual configuration by an operator of all endpoints to achieve the desired throughput by selecting the same compression technique to be used by the accelerator. By compressing the data, customer edge routers are able to send more data over the same amount of bandwidth compared with uncompressed data, which takes up more networking resources. Thus, network performance may be improved.